Youth Pastors Who Are Called To Church Planting

Yesterday I was asked to teach a seminar at an upcoming church planting conference. The title of my breakout session is Leaping From Youth Ministry to Church Planting. This is an interesting topic and one Geoff and I have been exploring for several months. Here are some of the questions we have been asking:

• What percentage of church planters come from youth ministry?

Answer so far - quite a few. Okay, so we don't have Barnaesque statistics on that yet. But we're working on it. If anyone has those stats, I'd love to hear 'em.

• How can youth pastors transition successfully from youth ministry to occupational church planting?

Ah, there's the rub. We've heard lots of horror stories about youth pastors going into their senior pastor's office and telling him of their calling to church planting. Then they hear the dreaded words: "I'll need your resignation letter by tomorrow morning." So instead of thinking through church planting strategy, they spend the next 24 hours thinking how to tell their wives they have to get a job at Home Depot. Immediately.

So one key is, we have to climatize the church, and the senior pastor, before any announcements. What is the best way to do that? Engage the church in church planting. So my recommendation is that when a youth pastor feels called to church planting, he or she start planting churches using the resources he or she currently has, namely, students. By familiarizing the church with church planting and giving them a heart for multiplication, student ministers will guarantee a better response if and when they decide to step away to be a full-time church planter. Not that working at Home Depot while planting a church is a bad idea, but it would be nice to have the support of your former church and former pastor. If climatizing is done well, they could end up as your sponsor, sending you money, people and resources to plant a new church. And that is good for them, for the kingdom and for your family.

So be patient. Read and reread the parable of the talents. Be faithful, and be wise. And don't jump till you are sure you are called to jump. A call to church planting does not mean you have to resign. It may mean you lead your church to multiply itself. And that is just cool.

• Does every youth pastor who feels a calling to church planting have to leave his current position?

I sort of got a little long-winded and answered this one already. But this begs a follow-up question: how do you fufill a calling to plant churches without becoming a full-time church planter? If you are a youth pastor, it may mean your youth group adopts a new church plant, sends encouragement emails to church planters' kids, offers your church or homes as Safehouses (see the Safehouses tab on our website), gives money to church planting, educates your church on church planting, takes a church planting mission trip (like a MissionMPossible deployment event or a Powerplant week), or actually plants a church. Shoot us an email if you need more ideas, we'd be glad to help (unless Geoff is fishing, in which case he will ignore your email. But he will get back to you the next week and be glad to help if you will listen to his fishing stories. "It was thi-is big...")

If you are a youth pastor who is considering church planting or a church planter who came from youth ministry, I'd love to hear your story. We may use it at the conference. And if you would like to join us February 26-27th in Cumming, GA, just go to www.churchplanters.com. You can register for the conference and for my seminar. I promise to have meticulous statistics by then. Just look for the guys in the orange aprons. Come to think of it, "you can do it, we can help" is not a bad slogan...

The "Church in the Container"

I found this awesome story about a United Methodist church plant in Berlin called "The Church in the Cntainer." The story was written by Kathleen LaCamera, a United Methodist News Service correspondent based in London.

What an inspiration! In this place of desolation and destruction (as many as 2,000 unexploded bombs from World War II are buried underneath the streets and buildings!), this group of believers has planted a church that meets in a storage container! Their vision is to reach their community through social ministries and action, especially ministries directed toward students. Check it out!

The Cow Story

Well, my Maasai ramblings haven't generated the conversation that I thought they would. So, I'll make this my last post. Of course, I saved my best story and reflection for last.

One interesting character that I met among the Maasai was an elder named Oneipu. (He bears an uncanny resemblance to the elder in the picture ... just a little more white hair.) Oneipu was a tribal leader in the area. On one of our last days in the area, one of Oneipu's cows fell in a hole and the men couldn't get it out. Its back was broken. Oneipu stayed out all night to protect the cow from hyenas and leopards. They could not allow this great wealth to be eaten by the wild animals. They needed to slaughter it for the people.

So, the Maasai developed a plan. They wanted us to take the missionary truck (a Toyota Hi-Lux, not found in the states) down in the bottom of the ravine, where we would all load the cow into the truck, and haul it back up to Oneipu's boma.

Well, it was an absolutely crazy and hilarious adventure ... but we got it done. I don't know how, but we picked up that half-ton cow and loaded it in the back of that truck.

When we reached the boma, Oneipu's son, George (who was the pastor of the church where we were serving), asked me to preach the Gospel. His father was not a Christian and many of the other men were not Christians. Needless to say, I was unprepared ... so I asked God to give me a message. It was in that moment, as I looked at the old cow "chowwing down" on the tall grass, and as I looked at those men, that God gave me my text ... the parable of the lost sheep. The only problem was, I had not seen any sheep in Maasailand ... I didn't even know if they had ever seen any sheep. Sooooo ... I didn't think that God would mind very badly if I did a bit of contextualization. I adapted the parable to that of "the lost cow." Instead of the shepherd, the parable had a herdsman ... and you can guess the rest. (Now, I know that some of you have tuned me out at this point and declared me a heretic, but just stick around, you'll like the ending!)

As God filled my heart and mouth with the words (and it was God, by the way), those men sat silently and listen. Their eyes kept darting from me to the cow lying on the ground behind me. After all, we had just lived out the words of this story! We had just left all of the other cows in the boma and gone on this great mission to save the one lost cow! At the end of my message, I handed over the "invitation time" to one of the local pastors.

What happened next was a holy moment that I know that I will never again experience on this side of heaven. Oneipu, the local tribal elder, arose from his seat in the rear, walked over to George (his son) and me, got down on his ancient knees between us, and gave his life to Jesus Christ. It was an unbelievable event, both to us and to the Maasai men who were in attendance. No other elders in that area had commited themselves to Jesus. They considered the Jesus religion to be a faith for only women and children. But on this day, the unthinkable had happened. A Maasai elder was walking with Christ. Everything had changed. In the coming days, Oneipu's conversion would surely lead to the conversion of many other local men as they followed his leadership.

The next day we had our closing celebration as we prepared to depart for home. Oneipu worshiped for the first time, as the only "Elder" of the church, at his son's side. It was a remarkable day. Right before we left, after the lunch "feast," Oneipu called me over and grabbed an interpreter. He placed a hand on my shoulder, and put a bony finger in my chest. He said, "I will never forget the day that you all saved my cow, for that was the day that God saved me." Shivers ...

Contextualization ... it means to reach people where they are, within their culture, with the message of Jesus Christ. All it takes is sharing the Bible and the message of Jesus through language and methods that the people of a given culture will understand. We do it so well on the international mission field. But why do we stink at it here in the USA? Traditionalism, maybe? Ignorance, pride, and arrogance ... probably.

Why are so many of our churches in North America plateaued or declining? Why are our baptisms on a steady downward spiral? Why is the church so rapidly becoming irrelevant here? It's because of our complete lack of contextualization. We are not only NOT reaching people in the current 21st century American culture ... we have DEFINED that culture as the actual ENEMY! How blindly, ignorantly absurd.

My prayer? God, please open the eyes and hearts of our dying churches in America! Help us understand that we live in a mission field, which demands a missional mindset and ministry strategy! Lord, as churches all around us are dying, please give birth to new churches which will embrace the culture, embrace the people you have created, and love them through ministry (not just judgmental preaching) to bring them to Jesus. Amen